Why the Pentagon will watch where you shop
New Total Information Awareness project will sniff company databases for terrorists.
by Faye Bowers and Peter Grier for the Christian Science Monitor.
See the ton of good links at the bottom too!

Credit-card companies already carry out such paper profiling as an antifraud device, say proponents of the new effort. That’s why you get a call when you suddenly start spending lots of money far from home, or exceed your daily allotment of transactions. Using such techniques to prevent another Sept. 11 may thus be simply a natural progression in technology.
But the recent theft of thousands of identities from commercial databases points out what can happen when such data falls into the wrong hands, say critics. And the federal government is not American Express. It has far greater power, and citizens thus need to assiduously protect their privacy from its snooping.
“Data files that become available [to the government] are likely to be used beyond their initial purpose, and we need to guard against that somehow,” says Robert Pfaltzgraff, professor of international security at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass.

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1203/p01s01-usgn.html
Why the Pentagon will watch where you shop
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Testing limits of police tactics in interrogations
How far Bush will go on conservative agenda
USA
from the December 03, 2002 edition
Why the Pentagon will watch where you shop
New Total Information Awareness project will sniff company databases for terrorists.
By Faye Bowers and Peter Grier | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON